Women Wake Up Faster -- From
Anesthesia

Women wake up faster from general anesthesia than men according to the medical journal
Anesthesiology. This was the first study to illustrate this
fascinating phenomenon.

Recovery from general anesthesia has long been known to be
affected by many factors. However, gender has never been recognized
as one of the factors that influences the time a patient takes to
emerge from general anesthesia.

The conclusion that women wake faster from anesthesia seems quite
convincing for the following reasons:

This discovery was made in a study designed for a different
purpose (to measure how quickly patients recover from their
anesthetic when using a special monitor of the depth of anesthesia).

The study was conducted not just at one, but four separate
medical centers -- at Duke University (Durham, NC), Emory University
(Atlanta, GA), the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and the
Massachusetts General Hospital (Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA)
-- and
at all four centers, women awakened significantly faster than
men.

The patients (274 in number) were randomly assigned to different
treatment groups but received the same anesthesia and in all
treatment groups, women woke up significantly faster than did
men.

The lead author of the report, Dr. Tong J. Gan from Duke, told
MedicineNet that he and his fellow investigators found that women
wake up faster from general anesthesia by serendipity -- purely by
accident!

The times from the end of anesthesia to eye opening and to a
response to a verbal command were significantly different between men
and women, meaning these differences were unlikely to be due to
chance.

Men consistently had prolonged recovery times from anesthesia
compared to women, supporting the principle that men and women differ
in their sensitivity to anesthesia.

Although the anesthesia used in this study involved 3 agents --
propofol, alfentanil, and nitrous oxide -- the sedative propofol
seems to be the agent responsible for the gender difference.

The molecular basis for this new difference between the sexes is
still unknown. This type of difference between the sexes (termed a
sexual dimorphism) appears to be a matter of pharmacogenetics --
genetic factors influencing the sensitivity to a drug.

The discovery that women awaken faster from general anesthesia
than men may also explain why the incidence of awareness during
surgery is reportedly higher in women. Women may awaken during
surgery at higher concentrations of propofol and perhaps other
anesthetic agents than men.